Functional Village

Children grew up so quickly. No, literally. The villager babies only took two days to become adults, and Technoblade found himself thrown out of rhythm by their sudden demands for more food and clothing. Thankfully, he had at least one brown-robed villager that immediately converted into a scribe.

"Your first job," Technoblade browsed through his villager controls and assigned the newly converted scribe his job. "Is to assign adult villagers their respective food chests based on the colours of their clothes. I know it may seem unfair but trust me when I say there is a good reason for this unfair distribution."

Of course, those with clothing that wasn't brown would be assigned to that single chest in the pit. It was there for decoration, meant to starve villagers to death. Technoblade ensured that even if they turned evil before they could starve to death, no other 'useful' villagers would be harmed.

The scribe got to work at once, and Technoblade counted the number of mouths he had to feed. The six children grew up one after another, and two of the six were not worker villagers. It was a pity, but Technoblade did not mind. After all, it was probably the right number of villagers needed for his first stage of starting a village. Nothing was more important than minions to help him manage certain tasks.

Apart from one scribe that Technoblade assigned to segregate villagers, the three other villagers were recruited as scribes without actual tasks to complete. According to his villager panel, villagers with no assigned jobs can do other tasks during 'working hours' such as upgrading their stats with a bookshelf nearby or socialising to increase overall population happiness.

Happiness was subjective, but the system admin made it easy to achieve in Aftercraft. By socialising, villagers can increase or maintain their happiness meter. The level of work a villager does must be proportional to their socialising hours. Unhappiness happens when an imbalance or a villager's needs are unmet.

Originally, Technoblade wanted his villagers to be as unhappy as possible because back in Skyblock, slavery was the answer to everything, regardless of a minion's opinion. His regime worked out perfectly. However, that was not the case with Aftercraft. The production of his slav– workers, was directly proportional to the happiness index. The Blood God was forced to admit how smart the system admin was in promoting villager rights.

With this new system, he could not create an iron farm even if he was somehow able to trap a rotting monster in the same cell as them. Unhappy villagers would kill each other, and the unhappiness level would increase, decreasing the productivity of his regular villagers.

In short, Technoblade had to fulfil the act of a benevolent ruler instead of an oppressive tyrant or a hot-headed rebel. It was very out of his character, but nobody said he could not do it the Technoblade way.

"Fine," he blinked. "Socialise away if you must. However, you're all going to take turns doing so. It doesn't take two people to socialise, and you don't need a lounge so you can do so in a productive cell away from sight forever if you're too dumb for a job."

That's right. Although brown-robed villagers were capable of getting jobs, some of them did not have the right stats for the jobs Technoblade had in mind for them. They could only do menial tasks such as farming or woodcutting that he did not require now. Not all villagers were born the same, even though they were all children of Adam and Eve. It was rare for a villager to be born with all stats of one. Even if they turned into brown-robed adults, they couldn't do anything apart from studying. Studying helped to increase a random stat point of a villager over time. He did not know how quickly villagers could level up their stat points, but his goal was to get a villager scribe to study to ten stat points so he could employ teachers.

Teachers were important as they could help villagers to focus on the stat points to increase. Children earned twice as many stat points by studying compared to adults. It made more sense, and Technoblade wanted to create two teachers so that he could have one focus on teaching children and the other on adults. Not all adult villagers could break the level five stat limit for all skills, so it was a game of luck. Most importantly, Technoblade needed a scribe with the very rare ability to get fifteen intelligence points to become his secretary. There were no limits to how many secretaries Technoblade could get, but he desperately needed one first to manage the village in his absence.

The system admin did not neglect to include limits to curb Technoblade's abusive nature. Each secretary could only control the schedules of twenty villagers, including themself. If Technoblade wanted to expand his empire and population, he would need more secretaries.

"Education is the keystone to Orphania," he stated and watched as the villagers walked around unhappily at the other side of the glass wall. Strangely enough, those who did not have jobs were also capable of socialising in their schedule even if they were unhappy. Technoblade wasn't one to overlook this strange bug.

His village's happiness meter was at a humble sixty-seven percent, but it was alright. Orphania did not need cheerful people, only workers to fulfil his needs.

While his villagers worked for him, Technoblade did not slack off. The iron he collected came in handy, and Technoblade chopped spruce trees for days until he had enough chests to expand the ridiculous food silo. He made an auto smelter that will smelt collected potatoes fresh from his farm after sorting out the poisonous ones to be dumped into the melon and pumpkin farm composting area. Carrots and cooked potatoes will be sent to the multi-level food silo so that all useful villagers can collect their daily meals.

He did not want to be a complete tyrant, so Technoblade offered them options even if they were limited. For now, carrots and baked potato made the bulk of the menu, but Technoblade also dumped some raw chicken into the auto smelter from his breeding activities. He eventually gave up on throwing eggs and made an egg dispenser to hatch new chickens for him in the coop. The endless supply of chickens made chicken almost an infinite resource in Orphania. Besides, who doesn't like chicken?

The grind for a sustainable food situation took about a week, and in that time, the scribes finally levelled up enough to become teachers. Technoblade converted three of the four scribes into teachers and hoped that one of them could eventually upgrade into a secretary.

Meanwhile, he had two new villager babies after collecting enough leather to make pants and two sets of standby clothing if they grew into good adults.

If all went well and they became brown-robed workers, Technoblade would acquire his first lumberjacks and eventually turn one of them into a carpenter.

Although he had a crafting workshop with the system perks, it was not the same for villagers. For now, getting a carpenter villager who could only create wood-related items such as chests, bookshelves and beds looked useless. The things a carpenter could do were limited. However, when paired with an architect, these people could limitlessly expand the empire without Technoblade managing the population in the long run. Of course, for that, he would require a secretary.

Giving the teachers specific instructions to educate the new children, Technoblade expanded his cow farm and slaughtered more using his maximised looting sword. The drop rates for leather were slightly higher with looting, but cows took longer to become adults compared to baby villagers. Aftercraft could be weird sometimes, and he sighed. Maybe he should assign some villagers to become tailors first, as the clothing process took the longest. It was the bottleneck of his population expansion plan.

Between collecting resources for clothes, giving instructions to his scribes and teachers, upgrading villagers and telling his only couple when to produce offspring, Technoblade made solid plans for a functional village. It took several adjustments on his end to find a solution using the twenty-villager headcount capacity. It was a tight fit, and Technoblade had to make a few sacrifices for the second phase of expanding his village into a town. However, it was good enough.

"Two for creating children, one secretary, one scribe, two teachers, two woodcutters, three stone miners, three shepherds and five farmers. That's nineteen in total, and the last headcount is definitely to train a new potential secretary candidate among the children."

Succession planning was important, and so far, Technoblade had fifteen villagers. Some were still children in training, and some were adults in training. Others had jobs but were still upgrading their skills for career progression. He had terrible luck getting suitable talents, so his plan was incomplete after two months.

Twice.

Twice, his plan to get a good secretary flopped when the villager had a capped limit for intelligence at twelve and fourteen, respectively. He eventually made them teachers but had to sacrifice the other two unfortunate scribes and starved them to death in the pit.

It took Technoblade a while to learn that brown-robes remained unemployed for as long as they were not assigned jobs. Their stat points were not related to their assigned jobs in any way. Even if a baby was born with a higher strength stat, it did not mean they would not hit the skill cap limit of five as all ordinary adults. Strength stat of two was the basic requirement as a miner, but it did not mean they were capable of career progression as an adult. However, if Technoblade spent more time force-educating the unemployed brown-robed adults to find out all their maximum stat, he could uncover their true potential and assign them to a better job.

It happened when he was so annoyed at the unlucky streak of wrongly assigned villagers that he parked an unassigned adult to the teacher and conveniently forgot about it. Thankfully, the system made teachers versatile. They would teach according to the priority of what Technoblade decided. If he forgot to specify what a villager should study, the teacher would decide and upgrade the stats of their student until everything was maxed out. The 'graduated' student would turn into an idling adult who socialised all day until given employment.

The accidental discovery of a villager's hidden potential made Technoblade commit mass genocide. All the villagers he had assigned jobs previously without having their stats maxed out under the care of teachers were forced into the starving pit. He slowly replaced all his key workers, but the process was so long-winded that Technoblade spent more time outside his village than inside.

He expanded his territory and even beautified the underground city he swore he would never decorate. Yet, finding a secretary among all these villagers proved harder than winning a lottery.

"Is there any way to improve the intelligence of an unborn child? Maybe Adam and Eve need educating?"

It was a strange thought, but Technoblade added bookshelves to the couples' cottage. Even if there were no teachers available to educate the horny couple, they could self-study to max out every other stat to five, which became a ceiling they could not break past without the help of a teacher. However, a little education went a long way and became the key to Technoblade's first secretary.

After two long months of trying, Adam and Eve finally gave birth to what he would deem the perfect baby.

Upon birth, the child had six intelligence stats, and Technoblade wondered why he did not kidnap a teacher to become the couple's private tutor in the first place. Bringing the teacher out of the underground city took effort, but it paid off when the couple started producing more useful babies.

"Finally!" Technoblade groaned after reading his morning mail. The villager he was waiting for eventually reached the intelligence level he wanted. He could finally get a secretary to manage his internal affairs!

Wasting no time, Technobalde rushed to the underground library to collect his unemployed genius.

Handing the genius a journal, Technoblade watched them turn into a scribe. Using the system and sacrificing some experience levels he gained from breeding and slaughtering chickens, Technoblade breezed through the career advancement process and made this villager his proxy.

The new management tab and instruction list for a secretary was amazing. Technoblade did not know how to code the way Fundy did, so he spent the rest of the day with his secretary testing several instruction options. The secretary was an amazing person who could assign three instructions to every individual tagged under its care that would override the individual default assigned jobs that Technobalde created.

For instance, if Tecnoblade desperately needed twenty beds from a carpenter, the carpenter would ignore the socialising schedule and work until it fulfilled the order of twenty beds before switching back to its default schedule.

More interestingly, he could give his secretary instructions to assign jobs to other villagers who met the criteria. Using this to his advantage, Technoblade placed the new proxy in charge of upgrading his villagers and talent management.

With this villager in charge during his absence, Technoblade felt more reassured that there would not be riots in his absence. It took almost a quarter of a year to create a functioning village and society, but it was worth it.

He could finally spawn the wither and create his beacon.